Man Utd above Liverpool in top 10 most desirable jobs this summer | OneFootball

This is going to be a very big summer for football managers. Lots of them are going to become available – especially after the World Cup, if it happens – and lots of clubs are going to be looking for their latest sacrificial lamb.

So how about a ranking of 10 jobs that will either definitely or conceivably be available this summer? Well, tough, you’re getting one anyway. It’s an obviously Premier League-flavoured offering, and some of these jobs are undoubtedly more available than others, and with a couple of huge jobs on the continent thrown in here as much for their potential influence on Premier League clubs’ plans as anything else.

Everything is the Premier League, you see. It always has been and always will be.

10) Chelsea

This may very well just be our own prejudices and biases at play, to be fair. We assume this job may well be available in the summer because we still – despite all and mounting evidence to the contrary – sometimes think of Chelsea as a football club.

We know they are no longer that, of course, but it’s still hard to fully accept despite the brazen openness with which they’ve been transformed.

So some part of us keeps thinking ‘But surely Chelsea will want to have a proper football manager rather than someone who wonders what the battle for Champions League qualification might tell us about B2B sales’. Yet we must accept that, actually, a manager over-promoted from within the organisation to a position he neither earned nor deserved might be just what this former football club actually wants.

Maybe they really do want an ager of men rather than a manager. Maybe they do want a respecter of the ball rather than a football respecter. Again, the evidence is there. Mauricio Pochettino and Enzo Maresca weren’t removed for football reasons, but for questioning the regime and its methods.

Liam Rosenior will never do that. And even if he does, he’ll do it in such impenetrable middle-management LinkedIn jargon guffspeak that nobody will even realise he’s kicking off at all.

So this job very well might not be available. And every single reason why it might not be available at all is also why it is a sh*t job for an actual football manager if it is in fact available. It is, in many ways, the most irritating job you can imagine for a manager.

Imagine trying to do the job at a club whose owners reckon they’ve uncovered an infinite money glitch that means you can spend as much money as you like on players, but not on the players you might actually want to improve the team now. Maddening. Go to Palace instead, honestly, at least it’s real.

9) Aston Villa

A hunch this one. But we think three things.

One, that Unai Emery may very well decide to sod it all for a game of soldiers and bugger off this summer having decided he’s taken Aston Villa as far as he can within the constraints of their standing within modern football.

Two, that he would very probably be right about that.

And thus three, any manager should think very carefully about replacing him.

It’s probably too glibly simplistic to say the only way is down for whoever follows Emery at Villa, but it is the overwhelmingly likely direction of travel given the near miracles Emery has performed to help Villa dismantle the Big Six machine but how close to every conceivable limit Villa have had to push to do so and where they were when he began this mission.

8) Crystal Palace

Never directly follow a club’s greatest ever manager is a shrewd policy, and one that applies to Crystal Palace this summer. Oliver Glasner has delivered the club’s greatest ever success, with their first major trophy and a foray into Europe, but it still feels like it’s ending on a sour note.

This is a club that dared to dream under the Austrian, but has been slapped back into place for its impertinence. Its best players have been harvested by others and, while Conference League glory may yet await, it’s been back to familiar mid-table Premier League drudgery for the most part this season.

And it’s very hard to see how any new manager coming in this summer elevates Palace back above their previous station. They will likely go back to the Palace we all knew and enjoyed, the team that always finished 12th with -something points to their name. There’s nothing wrong with that, and plenty of clubs would love a decade of such Premier League reliability, but Palace fans have now seen something more.

This is now a job where success is harder than ever to measure and harder than ever to achieve. Really, keeping Palace comfortably above any relegation unpleasantness should constitute fine and successful work, but that feels uncomfortably at this stage like it is both going to be harder than ever and less appreciated than ever next season.

7) Tottenham

Impossible to know where to put them at this point, because we don’t yet know where they will put themselves. For most of the last month we’ve been in the curious position of being faced with a team that was not in the relegation zone, had never once all season been in the relegation zone, but which felt like it was absolutely certain to get relegated.

The wildly unexpected point at Liverpool is just one point in a fight that will require more, but for the first time in a long time there is hope that this freefalling catastroclub might at the very least make a fight of it. That sense of forlorn but hilarious inevitability has gone, for the time being.

At least until the weekend’s stupidly inevitable and inevitably stupid defeat to Nottingham Forest it has become once more a four-way scrap with Forest, West Ham and Leeds to avoid the one  remaining place in the bottom three alongside doomed Wolves and Burnley. And therefore no matter how inevitable Tottenham’s relegation might feel it still remains somehow for now more likely that they stay up than go down. Even if it still doesn’t really feel that way at all for a team that hasn’t won a Premier League game since cheeseburgers were a penny.

But if they are a Premier League team, then the appeal of this job should be pretty obvious. Yes, you will have to deal with a lot of nonsense and some idiot nepo-baby owners who don’t have the first clue what they are doing and a CEO so incompetent that his actions genuinely make more sense if you pretend he’s still being paid by Arsenal.

And yes you will inherit a complete mess of a squad that was already incoherent even before back-to-back seasons of absurd injury crisis. We have always been loathe to allow it to become an excuse for Spurs, given the scale of their dreadfulness over such a long period now, but it has been mental.

The reality of the situation is that even if they do survive this season, the squad is in need of total upheaval. The players that need to be moved on and replaced include a great number of what are on paper actually among Spurs’ very best players. Even if they haven’t been seen for a year. Especially if they haven’t been seen for a year.

So yeah, it’s an absolute mess. But what an opportunity as well. When and where else could you come into a club the size of Spurs and be genuinely able to spin a ninth-place finish in your first season as a staggering and unlikely triumph against the odds?

Bill Nicholson believed Spurs were a club who aimed so high that ‘even failure will have in it an echo of glory’. They are now a club aiming so low that the faintest echo of glory will constitute success.

Mauricio Pochettino is still the favourite, by the way.

6) Paris Saint-Germain

At least three of the other teams on this list have been seriously linked with a summer move for Luis Enrique, and the brutal reality is that no matter how big and impressive PSG become, they are always going to be limited for as long as the current established order of European football survives.

Unless and until a European Super League takes over, PSG will always be in France and that is a problem. For as long as you’re stuck in a Ligue des Agriculteurs, there’s only so much you can do. And Luis Enrique has already done pretty much all of it. The only thing he didn’t win was the Trump World Cup, and that isn’t real and can’t hurt you.

There has been a sense of ennui around PSG and their manager this season. A clear feeling that the mountain has been scaled and so…what next? The answer really is nothing much. They might win the Champions League again but probably not. They probably will win the French League again but so what.

It probably is time for Luis Enrique himself to go and take another big league challenge, but his successor in Paris will face all the same issues with the added one of not even having the chance to become the manager who finally ends their wait for the Champions League title.

The next PSG manager is thus almost doomed to, at best, ‘meh’ status.

Winning the Champions League remains the only measurable way to be a successful PSG manager given domestic dominance is so expected and assumed, and the thing about winning the Champions League is that even if you’re very good it’s actually quite hard to do on any kind of consistent basis. Yeah, we know, it’s mad.

5) Manchester City

For the longest time it looked like whichever poor sap had to replace Pep Guardiola at Man City would be walking into a post-Fergie United situation. Where it would just be impossible to follow the guy. If you succeeded, he would still get a chunk of the credit. If you failed, that was on you.

Now, though, it just feels ever so slightly different. If Guardiola decides enough is enough and leaves City this summer as we still think he might, it no longer looks like such an impossible act to follow after two challenging seasons.

This one might yet contain silverware, with City retaining active interest in both domestic cups. But it almost certainly won’t contain either of the big prizes and in all likelihood won’t contain a convincing tilt at either of them.

City were nowhere near it in the Premier League last season and their Champions League campaign was a shambles. Now they have been unable to put meaningful pressure on an Arsenal side who a few weeks ago were absolutely itching for the chance to bottle it, but who have now to their delight discovered there is nobody there to pounce even if they do.

Another humiliating early exit from the Champions League also awaits.

That’s two ropey seasons back to back for a man who had dominated the Premier League with a totality and longevity that only Fergie could beat.

And that makes replacing him no longer the millstone it once appeared. Canny stuff from Pep, unlike the selfish show-off Fergie who just couldn’t help himself as he insisted on winning the Premier League in his last season with a team he knew would look like mid-table slop in anyone else’s hands.

Unfortunately, there is still the pesky issue of all those charges which may or may not ever amount to anything but which increasingly appear to be something that Pep himself no longer needs to fuss over.

4) Brighton

Just seems to be the best possible job anyone can have, for specifically two years before it becomes quite annoying. Fabian Hurzeler is the latest, and we’re certain whoever follows him on the south coast will steer Brighton to at least one upper mid-table, European-places-bothering finish before departing along with three Chelsea-bound players and rocking up at a mid-tier European powerhouse.

There are worse ways to make a living in this game than bobbing along happily under the radar at a club that has well-run itself into a position of cosily insulated security. All you have to do as Brighton manager is not actively f*ck it up. Seems like a good life, if we’re honest.

3) Liverpool

Sunday against Spurs was a new low and Slot has never seemed on shakier ground. Faced with a team that Liverpool have historically blitzed at Anfield, his team instead sleepwalked lazily and somehow obliviously into an obvious catastrophe.

Against a team with absolutely no confidence that always concedes two goals in every single game – usually before half-time – a Liverpool team that very often concedes infuriating and avoidable late game-changing goals decided to just lift-and-coast on a 1-0 lead. Sure, it’s a busy time of the year and teams are spread thin, but adopting tactics that allowed the worst team in the division to visibly grow in confidence and belief at a ground that holds only horrifying recent memories for them was absurd.

Liverpool have been so far off it this season that it’s become easy to forget how it all started. This was the team that sauntered to last season’s title unopposed and then spent fortunes on improving an already imposing squad.

By early September they were already being handed a title they haven’t in the end even challenged for. They may very well miss out on the Champions League at present speed and course.

Even qualifying for that may not be enough to save Slot, especially if this season’s Big Cup effort comes to an end at Galatasaray’s hands this week. A repeat of anything like the Spurs game will do it.

But the extent to which Liverpool have dropped back this season might make the job more appealing in a way. Better in many ways to come into the job after this season than to do so had Slot masterminded another title win and then been poached by your Real Madrids or whoever.

The only way then would have been down. Now whoever comes in has significant headroom. But also some big decisions about some ageing stars.

2) Manchester United

More desirable than the Liverpool job? Right now – and for the first time in over a decade – you’d have to say yes. The more complicated issue is really how available the job actually is.

One of the big downsides to both the United and Liverpool jobs is the chokehold those clubs’ former players now have on the punditocracy in this country. And they all have a lot of opinions. When it comes to the Man United alumni, those opinions are nearly always distinctly Fergie flavoured for very obvious but no longer particularly useful – and now often actively unhelpful – reasons.

It’s a big downside to the job; still, after all this time, Fergie’s shadow looms over it. And no matter how good you are, you have effectively zero chance of being Fergie.

The United alums are currently locked in a debate that has split them in two. It’s either extremely obvious that what Michael Carrick has done so far – an effort so impressive that it’s even got Rio Ferdinand taking to the F365 tables page – should get him the permanent job or extremely obvious that the former Middlesbrough manager cannot possibly be ready for so sacred a posting.

The spectre of Ole Gunnar Solskjaer looms unavoidably over Carrick, and this was always the danger when United took the club-legend-interim route again. If Carrick failed, it was bad, if Carrick succeeded, it was awkward.

We get a sense that some of the loudest anti-Carrick voices are really just hedging. That they now accept he will get the job and are covering bases. If he continues on his current trajectory even when having to play a normal number of games in a normal number of competitions then great, and if he goes Full Ole then at least they can say “I told you so!”

But what happened to Solskjaer is not Carrick’s fault. The fear of a repeat is understandable, but Carrick is making a deeply persuasive argument at this time. And if not Carrick, then who? United have tried all flavours of manager since Fergie. Wise old heads, bright young things, sensible mid-careerers, aged and faded former bright young things.

If Solskjaer’s failings make Carrick untenable, then all those other failures make pretty much every manager unsuitable. There isn’t going to be another Fergie, guys.

1) Real Madrid

It’s the gigantic elephant in the Premier League room. For all the financial dominance of Our League, there is still not one club within it that can turn heads like Real Madrid. Liverpool were Premier League champions and apparently at the start of a bold new era of dominance when local lad Trent Alexander-Arnold was lured away, and Liverpool still haven’t got over it in either a footballing or emotional sense.

That Real Madrid knock hits different, and whatever grand managerial plans any Premier League club might have this summer could unravel in an instant once Real Madrid show their hand. They still feel like the one club that could even tempt Jurgen Klopp out of his deeply contented retirement from the day-to-day hassle of management.

At the moment, it’s still Alvaro Arbeloa in charge but it just doesn’t feel very Real Madrid to stick with that, despite what his team did to Pep Guardiola and Man City in the Champions League. Funnily enough, it’s much more of a Barcelona tactic.

Arbeloa is straight out of the Pep-at-Barca playbook: former player, B Team coach, promoted to the top job and then opening a first-team pipeline for a host of academy players.

Still feels certain that it will be big-name time once again this summer, though, for a job that has already chewed up and spat out the brightest young hope in the coaching game this season.